Beyond Retail Dashboards

While store dashboardsare ubiquitous in retail, today’s storeleaders need more than numbers on a screen.

Store managers thrive when they have the relevant data at their fingertips to make decisions quicklywithout getting bogged down in analysis or data manipulation.

Traditional store dashboardsaddress only the first step in this process—serving up the numbers—yet, they rarely attempt to answer critical business questionsincluding:

What does this mean for my business?

What can do I about it?

What should I do now (what’s my best next action)?

People Managers, not Data Scientists

Your store managers’ time is best spent solving problems, not crunching numbers. However, most retail dashboards require managers to devote multiple hours per week to analyzing and interpreting data.

Whether your team uses a sophisticated business intelligence system or a collection of Excel spreadsheets, chances are good that your store leaders are challenged to find the time to decipher store data to arrive at business insights that drive the business forward. Their skill set and passion lies in managing people and selling product – not in data science.

A Speedometer Versus a GPS

Dashboards are essentially a speedometer, informing mangers of the basics of “how much” (average order size) and “how many” (number of transactions, number of store visits).

More powerful store day management solutions, on the other hand, resemble Waze (or GPS) for store leaders, addressing the underlying questions that drive the business:

Where do I need to go? What are my goals for today and how does that stack up against my performance this week or this month?

What’s the best route to get there?Using the performance levers that are within my control as a store leader (increasing conversion, upselling and cross-selling, etc.) how can I increase my chances of making my sales plan today?

What obstacles might I encounter on my route and how can I avoid them?How can I meet my goals while taking into account factors outside of my control such as lower traffic or an inexperienced associate team? What can I do to compensate, such as shifting assignments, providing real-time training via self-service 3-minute skills videos, etc.?

Store leaders can realize significantly more value from robust tools that pair the functionality of a dashboard with a smart recommendation engine, on-demand skills videos, and easy-to-useframeworks for all levels of the organization. When stores can leverage the full potential of their store data to drive performance, the impact on store performance—and customer experience—is profound.